Description of the picture:
Kingdom of Flora – Nicolas Poussin. 1630-1631. Canvas, oil. 131×182
Nicolas Poussin – French painter, founder of classicism painting. The vast majority of his paintings are written on historical and mythological subjects. “Kingdom of Flora“- one of the earliest works written by Poussin upon arrival in Rome in 1624.
Works on mythological subjects can be fully appreciated if you know how they are presented by ancient authors. The main literary source of the story about Flora is Ovid’s Metamorphoses. There are a lot of characters on the canvas, and they all appear in Ovid’s story. Flora is an old Italian goddess of flowers, in the allegories of the four seasons she personifies spring (the transformation of the Greek goddess of flowers of Chlorida into Roman Flora is the plot of Sandro Botticelli’s famous painting “Spring”)."